IBM launches mainframe systems to run up to 8000 VM

The most traditional computer maker. International Business Machine Corp. (IBM) announced today that it has unveiled its Linux-only servers, Linux ONE. The company has further added that it has revealed LinuxONE Emperor and Linux ONE Rockhopper for the large enterprises and mid-sized businesses, respectively. These servers are claimed to be the “world’s most developed Linux system.”

The companies like IBM are trying to drive focus at the mainframe systems by lowering their prices. “The real question is how effective the group will be in attracting members whose interest may be initially limited,” Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT said.

The LinuxOne Rockhopper is a trimmed version of the Emperor, which is designed for the emerging markets. Meanwhile, the Emperor servers are developed to scale up to 8,000 virtual machines or thousands of containers that would be maximum for any single Linux system. It further explains, a virtual machine is an ‘object’ of a computer that is designed to run its own operating system, which is treated as a virtually independent OS by the host machine.

“This is all about collaborating with the community and providing those software capabilities that we believe our clients are looking for, and being able to that in a way that will inherit those mission-critical enterprise qualities of the platform”.

In addition, the announcement revealed that the Linux foundation will start an Open Mainframe Project in association with ‘ nearly a dozen’ number of organisations, which will urge the adoption of Linux on mainframes. “The Open Mainframe Project gives these customers, vendors and service providers one place to come together,” Ross Mauri, general manager for IBM Systems explained.

IBM says that their new hardware enables the users to run the software like Apache Spark, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and Chef, worldwide. The firm has spent hundreds of million to develop these systems.

UK-based Canonical will distribute its Ubuntu open source software onto the LinuxONE and z systems.

Also, reports coming from IBM suggests that the firm is developing a LinuxONE Developer Cloud, which allows open access to the development community.